


Our bodies, born to heal, become so prone to die.

by voidwizard



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Body Horror, Cool Space Shit, Fuckin PHYSICS innit, Tharizdun Champion!Essek, eldritch horror, fucked around and found out but a little too much, rip essek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:41:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26539759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidwizard/pseuds/voidwizard
Summary: Essek fucked around and he found out. Enjoy, folks! thank you to ETFC for enabling me while i wrote this and provided me with support as i embarked once more unto the breach.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Our bodies, born to heal, become so prone to die.

**Author's Note:**

> title is from "Mars" by Sleeping at Last. Comments and kudos are greatly appreciated! <3 much love

It is the eleventh hour. 

The Mighty Nein are in dire straits, faced down by every member of the Cerberus Assembly on all sides. Caleb smells seawater as a warm breeze washes over him, no doubt thanks to Caduceus, bringing with it a second wind of focus and determination. In a flash, he knocks Da’leth’s spell from the air with his own orange bolt of arcane abeyance. Seizing the opportunity, he quickly dips his hands into his pocket, pulling out a cat’s cradle, coated in phosphor, and slams it into the ground. Five streaks of fire stretch out like fingers, and sear channels into the ground as they race out towards their marks. To his credit, though Caleb admits this grudgingly, Ikithon does not scream as a jet of flame singes his skin, nor do the others, save for Da’leth. As his scream rends the air, Caleb feels the fear, the heat, and the screams of his parents, but shakes it off, steeling himself for whatever comes next. 

Stepping back, he notices Yasha, standing guard over Beau’s bleeding form as another storm of blades whistles around her. He hears a crackle of electricity, and then a wet gurgle as Fjord slumps to the floor, blood oozing from his lips. Jester cries out, and the world seems to slow around Caleb. All around him, his allies are beaten, bloodied, and broken. This is the end, Caleb, he tells himself. He looks resolutely into the face of his former mentor, greasy and pallid as he remembers, and is comforted by the fact that death is but moments away. 

There is a loud, ear-splitting crack, and then a tearing sound, as a familiar white-haired drow floats into the room, hand outstretched, eyes focused. Spells fizzle out, and for the barest moment, the room is silent. He twists his hand, and clenches his fist, and reality itself seems to fundamentally break. The Cerberus Assembly, all powerful mages in their own right, are no match for the ravages of time, and Essek knows this. He calls upon the fundamental forces of the universe to assault these old and powerful mages, rending and rearranging them at the atomic level, turning them into grotesque, twisted simulacra of themselves for instants that feel like eternities. Caleb watches as crimson drips from Essek’s nose, splattering across the alabaster floor as if it is fresh snow. The dripping becomes a stream as the mages, one by one, crumble, dissolve into dust, and reform, older, cracked, and nearly broken. Ikithon raises a shaking finger as he reforms, and a spell begins to coalesce in his hand. Caleb goes to shout, but time slows to a standstill. 

And then something breaks.

Trent looks up, sneer carved into his ashen features, but fear is writ large in his eyes. Caleb can tell why, as a broken, ravenous rift devours him. The rift closes as Essek’s form crumples to the floor like a broken doll, air rushing in around to fill the void left by the mages. Yasha is the first one to Essek’s body, but as she touches him, she is thrown across the room as if slapped away by an invisible hand. Reality stretches and distorts in a uniquely unnatural manner, atoms of the floor being torn away, twisting and screaming as their very nature is perverted by whatever it is that Essek has meddled with. Like a puppet on strings his limp form rises, head snapping forward with a dry crack, and Caleb looks on in mute horror as the skin around his eyes begins to flake away, revealing onyx void and twinkling stars; roiling, voracious darkness behind his now completely opaque eyes. A seven-pointed star with a jagged spiral in the center slowly blossoms into place between his brows, as if branded into his skin by the heat of a sun. The temperature of the room drops bone-chillingly quickly, and the light from the torches flickers, before blinking out completely as it seems to be sucked into his eyes. Caleb’s head begins to spin, and he begins to see spots. He drags himself against the undulating gravitational forces, slowly weaving together the last of his arcane wit, and manages to release it before his vision goes black. 

He opens his eyes, and it feels like sand scraping against his eyeballs, pain scraping trails and channels into the tender flesh there below. The pain flares again and again as he blinks, but at least he can see. As he sits up, his muscles scream out in primal agony, each fiber stretching to its breaking point. Voices, muffled, find their way to his ears but he does not process them. The words, he can’t parse them. But he can see the air warbling, warping and wobbling as the words are spoken. And he doesn’t quite perceive people as people. What he sees instead are umbral, wavering shapes, vaguely humanoid, and he sees filigree threads connecting these shades, looping and spiraling in nearly incomprehensible jumbles. Looking down at himself, rather than shades of grey, he perceives full, almost too full, color. He was resplendent in colors he didn’t even know could exist, powerfully blinding in their scope. And from him he sees a distinct lack of threads.

He blinks. 

Time slows, and he rises, floats like a puppet on cut strings. A voice, low, rumbling, furious, echoes inside his skull. It speaks, no, it sings an inhuman chorus of rage and hunger, of cosmic chained gluttony and barely contained rage, of wanton, ceaseless destruction and epoch-defining consumption. Try as he might, he cannot form a thought, each individual shred of sapience meeting the same fate as the wizened mages of Rexxentrum, ravaged by the roiling warring forces at the edges of the universe. 

He blinks. 

His vision shifts again, and he begins to perceive the world in painful contrast, as if everything is a miniature sun, and it hurts. He is not accustomed to sunlight, blinding and harsh, but he knows he hates it, and he reaches out to block it. Instead of covering his eyes, though, the last scrap of mortality in him watches in mute, slack-jawed horror as the plant across the room twista apart, forming chains and lashes, spontaneously cracking and blinking, as it undulates and roils across the room, wholly insane and mind-shatteringly incorrect. The pot rises through the air and shatters, shards of pottery disintegrating in midair as they are ripped asunder at the most fundamental level, tendrils of soil randomly flashing into amorphous masses of metal, extending, reaching, following the fusiform mosaic of each thread of fate and potentiality, wrapping around them and pulling. Everything screams, his head is filled with that unearthly chorus, and for the first time he perceives the mortals behind him as they are ripped apart, pulled in every direction at once. He pulls again on these shadowy tendrils and relishes in the pain as the three figures behind him cease their wavering, umbral existence, and their threads shatter leaving no trace of their existence behind. 

He floats above the carnage, aloof and broken, and can do nothing but laugh. Castle Ungebroch, such a mighty bastion of Dwendalian strength and nationalistic pride, reduced to rubble and splinters in an instant. Gone are the soaring towers, the spiraling staircases and peaked roofs, replaced by twisted, undulating forms of living stone, eyes in clusters flitting about, relaying what they see to their chained master, and a crater, wherein an opaque, roiling orb of pure, distilled darkness gently hovers. He alights near the entrance and walks, the trees bending away from him, the grass underfoot blackening and dying in an instant. The sun is muted, as if it is trapped behind tinted glass, but to any that might observe him, he doesn’t reflect anything. He walks along, the path underfoot twisting and shifting in infinitesimally myriad ways, shattering and reforming in geometrically irrational ways. Faster now, and faster still, he approaches unto the rift, obstructions in his path bending and tearing out of his path, as a sharp spike of pain begins to split his forehead, the spiral widening into a similar pitch-black eye. He sees the threads now, some thicker than others, more woven into the fabric of reality, and some much thinner, less consequential, but still of great import. He strides, hands outstretched, unto the breach, and as he enters within its influence, he blinks once more. 

He is floating. He is floating in a vast expanse of suffocating darkness. And chained before him is a roiling monster, all teeth and glistening gums, roaring and tearing at its chains to no avail. Around it are seven stakes, driven into the fabric of space and time, hewn from twisted platinum and adamantine, infused with distilled divinity, and engraved with runes in many scripts he can read, and twice as many that he cannot. It does not speak, and yet he can comprehend its hellish intention. It has bound him to service. He has tangled himself with this creature that defies mortal perception, and he will pay for it. He will pay in blood and sweat and souls and fear. He will bend to the will of the Chained Oblivion. He has no other choice. 

Very well then. He will serve. He will bend. He blinks again. 

The rift is gone. And all across Wildemount, devastation reigns. Essek Thelyss, formerly Shadowhand to the Bright Queen, Leylas Kryn, is a harbinger of death and destruction. In his wake, reality twists and bends, buildings curling and warping in on themselves, and yet he is unbothered. Entropy reigns as living matter crumbles and dissolves in thin air, as screams ring out from crushed bloody half-alive corpses, as steel and copper and iron rust away. Behind him ride a cohort of humanoid forms in chains, arms of maze-like tattoos extending from their sleeves and blades of twisted iron and platinum clenched in hand. Trailing thick, noxious smoke, their presence is heralded by the temperature dropping to freezing cold, ice crawling across any solid surface in the same maze-like pattern. 

And eyes blank and star-studded, he leads these Wraiths of the Oblivion unto the breach. Slowly but with determination, they rip the Betrayerspawn from their bindings, disrupting the underlying foundations of all of Wynandir. Rifts and faults begin to spread, as if the lithosphere is become glass, and long-dormant evils from long before the Founding rear their rotting heads, their twisted and jagged teeth rending the land, and above all the chaos, there rings out one voice:

“The Epoch of Ends is Nigh.”


End file.
